Venus Express: One Year in Orbit, Symposium at the 2007 EGU General Assembly Options

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Forwarding an email that was sent out today by Dmitri Titov, Venus Express PI. Cross reference with this UMSF thread.

Dear Colleagues,

the General Assembly of the European Geophysical Union (EGU) will be held on April 15-20, 2007 in Vienna, Austria. The Symposium PS 2.1 "Venus Express: one year in orbit", included in the science Programme, will be focused on presentation and discussion of the results obtained during the first year of the orbital mission. Please find the description of the Symposium at the end of the e-mail and visit the EGU Web site: http://meetings.copernicus.org/egu2007/ for more details about the Assembly.

We would like to encourage you to take part in the Symposium and to submit contributed abstracts. Please note that the deadline for abstracts submission is January 15, 2007.

Best regards

Dima Titov and Hakan Svedhem,
The Conveners
_________________________________________________
On April 11, 2006 Venus Express-the first European satellite at Venus- was inserted in orbit around the planet and began collecting data. The results of the first year of observations will be presented at the Symposium. The Programme will consist of solicited talks focused on the Venus Express observations and contributed presentations of the preliminary data analysis. The contributions related to the physics of Venus atmosphere, its plasma environment and the surface and based on the analysis of the data from Venus Express and earlier missions, theoretical studies and numerical modelling are highly welcome. Perspectives of the future Venus exploration will be discussed.

Convener : D. Titov (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany) Co-convener : H. Svedhem (ESA/ESTEC, The Netherlands)

[dvandorn]

I'm unsure whether this observation should go here, or in the policy forum, or what -- but here goes.

In America, science and research operate in a "publish or perish" mode. Every scientific investigation (except for those undertaken by the defense and intelligence agencies) is *designed* into a process that results in articles and papers which document the investigation and its results. It's nearly impossible to get funding for anything here in the U.S. that doesn't lead to published results -- if you spend grant money and don't publish results, you don't get any more grant money.

Now, while there is similar pressure to publish in Europe, I imagine, there is (from what I have observed) somewhat less pressure to do so. As long as you don't need more money, a European scientist can take as long as he/she wishes to play with his/her data and publish results. There is less pressure to get your results analyzed and published than in the U.S., since in the U.S. that next grant is always riding on whether or not you got the results of your last grant's investigation published.

I don't know why there seems to be less publishing-pressure in Europe than in the U.S. -- perhaps it's a manifestation of the same phenomenon that saw the French CEO of a primarily American consulting firm come to its Chicago offices and complain about American productivity, announcing cuts in holidays and vacation allottments, while his European employees all received six *weeks* of vacation time annually (as a start-up benefit) as opposed to the five *days* of vacation per year that he was now imposing on his American employees of less than five years' employment. In other words, perhaps it is simply a slower, less pressing culture in Europe (but with an expectation that someone else will work their butts off for them) that reduces the publishing pressure in Europe.

Then again, you have the old Soviet system. In the Soviet planetary exploration program, while it resulted in a number of papers and some reduction of the data received, it seems that their investigators could publish if they wanted, but that there was no expectation of scientific results. The simple act of sending the probe to another planet and receiving *any* data (usually pictures) satisfied the political goals that generated the funding, and so actually reducing the data and analyzing it seemed to have been a poorly-attended-to afterthought. I mean, just how many of the tens of thousands of Lunakhod images still exist? How much of the fields-and-particles data returned by *any* Soviet planetary probe is available for further analysis? Like I said, there seemed to be no real interest in doing anything with the science returns from Soviet probes, except in some cases by a few individuals who were really interested in the results. There was no connection between funding and even *looking* at the science return, it seemed.

So, that seems to be the spectrum. And while the pressure to analyze the data and publish your findings seems to get a little more accomplished here in the U.S. than gets done (or at least released to us peons) in Europe, I will point out that, even though the data return may be lacking, the purely political motivators for the Soviet explorations got nearly as much done as the somewhat more scientifically motivated American explorations. We just didn't see as much in the way of results from it.

-the other Doug